Ask HN: What web/desktop apps do you use to manage your startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What web/desktop apps do you use to manage your startup?

38 pointsacangiano23 comments

What set of utilities and services (online or offline) do you use to manage your startup? There are obviously many possible needs, like book-keeping, private and secure sharing and backing up of files, communication between co-founders and partners, customer care and ticket handling, etc... I'm not clueless about these subjects, but I'd like to hear what the HN community recommends.

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  Planning: VIM
  Blogging: VIM
  E-mail:   VIM
  Coding:   VIM
  Finances: VIM
  VCS: Git .. with comments edited in VIM ;)

Out of curiosity, how do you do your email and finances from Vim? Is there an awesome email plugin for vim that I don't know about =]

Have you seen this:

http://vimperator.org

I would be interested in a write-up of how you do your planning and finances using Vim (format, helper scripts, etc).

I'm mostly interested in your workflow/text file formatting is like.

Planning: Pivotal Tracker.

Finance: Kashflow.

Todos: Basecamp.

SVN: Beanstalk.

Tickets: Zendesk.

Files [internal, collaboration & sharing]: Dropbox.

Email: Google Docs.

This wiki was created to list what tools are used by which startups. http://startuptools.pbworks.com/

Github, Campfire & Basecamp, and Google Apps for Domains.

In no particular order:

Bitbucket (mercurial hosting), Gmail, Komodo Edit, Dropbox, Gtalk, Zoho Docs

For the record I know Komodo isnt really "management" but as it's the most crucial part of my workflow.... :)

PM: Basecamp

Finance: OSX Numbers

Billing: iBiz

Files/Hybrid SVN: Dropbox

External Com: OtherInbox.com

Internal Com: GTalk, Skype, iChat, etc.

Documents: OSX Pages and Google Docs

Just to mention, Microsoft office offers some pretty nifty services in this regard. Check out Office Live Small Business. You get a workspace with 5Gb of file storage. You can view docs, ppts right in the browser and with a plugin you can edit them right on your desktop MS office.

There's also Live Mesh service (seperate 5 GB) that allows you to sync files across different computers. You can use it as a documentation, file sharing tool. .

We have a Team of 5. We started with a google based solution for now.

Conference Calls: Skype 3$ accounts(to dial into US) + http://www.freeconference.com/

Mailing List: Google Groups

Collaboration: Google Docs

Scheduling: Google Calendar

Project Mgmt: Google Sites (with different task list), with widgets showing our docs + calendars on google services.

Files: Google groups has 100 MB, so does Sites.

VCS: git/svn on pvt server.

Do we seriously have to re-ask this question every few weeks?!

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

I'm not happy with my mix yet, and spend too much time trying out new things. Here's what I'm currently using:

PM: Google notebook, Google calendar, "Stickies app" (Tomboy)

Finance: sigh still looking

Files: Dropbox

Communications: GMail, Skype (NOT Twitter)

Documents: Mix Google Docs & OpenOffice. I've started using Etherpad quite a bit as well.

Invoicing & Billing: Still looking for something that fits my needs, Spreadsheets & Docs for now

Source code: Local SNV server, thinking about Github

Give a try on CurdBee (http://curdbee.com) for invoicing and billing. It would fit perfectly for your startup if you are looking for a smart and low cost solution (you can start using it for Free!)

A couple of FREE products I would recommend are:

Simply Accounting First Step Express for accounting http://www.simplyaccounting.com/downloads/firststep/express/

and

Billing Boss for invoicing http://www.billingboss.com/

I am a single programmer startup. Still working on my website.

TortoiseSVN (source control) is the only thing I am using as of now.

I have a to-do.txt in my desktop to remind me of what next. I use Gmail to communicate and StackOverflow to get help. Since I haven't completed building my application, I never needed other services to manage the work.

As a freelancer:

Misc: Backpack

Project proposals: Writeboard

Invoicing: Freshbooks

Source control: Github

Bugs: Redmine and Pivotal Tracker

Other docs: Google Docs

To dos: Things

Files: Dropbox

As a freelancer :

Project management : BaseCamp

Personnal GTD improvement : RescueTime

Invoices & estimates : Freshbooks

Accounting : my accountant uses Simply Accounting (Windows app on my vmware box)

Files : dropbox

Source control : Git on RepositoryHosting.com (6$/month and i can manage any number of SVN/Git repositories. And it just works)

Synch iCal with google calendar

Synch contacts with Plaxo

Thanks for the tip on RepositoryHosting :-)

Their price rocks.

Book-keeping: Saasu Issue/Bug Tracking: Lighthouse SVN hosting: Beanstalk Backups: Amazon S3 Site Monitoring: Pingdom

All of which I'd recommend - Saasu especially if you're based in Australia.

Project management: Trac Versioning: SVN/Trac Monitoring: Nagios, Pingdom Support: Get Satisfaction Newsletters: Campaign Monitor Communication: Gtalk, Email

We use http://www.helpspot.com

Pivitol Tracker, Harvest, Google Apps for Domain.

Jira & FishEye.

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